Sean Mcbride

Every so often I hear about a movie that has such an absurd premise that I find myself thinking that the film is pre-destined to be a bomb. That’s the

This image released by Universal Pictures shows Monica Barbaro, left, and Callum Turner in a scene from "One Night Only."

I have always loved a good dinosaur movie. From those stop-motion Ray Harryhausen films to “The Land Before Time” to “Jurassic Park” (and all the inferior sequels), I get excited

Enid Blyton is a British children’s book author who penned 762 books over the course of her career. I bring this up because I had never even heard of her

Prostate cancer patients with biochemical recurrence (BCR) face a decision of whether to start salvage therapy (ST), which may reduce the probability of metastatic progression at the cost of side effects. To inform the decision to start ST at or after BCR, models that make counterfactual predictions incorporating treatment are highly desirable. However, estimation of such models using observational data requires care due to time-varying confounding by the longitudinal biomarker prostate-specific antigen (PSA). Moreover, a careful definition of the estimands of interest, referred to as “predictimands”, is required due to the possibility of delayed initiation of treatment after biochemical recurrence. In this study, we utilize the framework of joint longitudinal and survival models to tackle these issues, estimating a model for pre-ST PSA trajectories and risk of metastasis that incorporates the effect of ST, from a dataset of 2075 patients with BCR. We define relevant predictimands for a new patient after BCR under three scenarios: Immediately treated, never treated, and treatment under a dynamic regime, where ST is started when PSA is observed to exceed a pre-specified threshold. We propose a Monte Carlo scheme for computing these predictimands, adapting previous work on dynamic predictions from joint models to account for treatment timing. This methodology is applied to an example patient and validated in a simulation study. This methodology could be adapted to a wide variety of applications requiring counterfactual predictions in the presence of time-varying treatments and biomarkers. Code to implement such analyses is available in the R package JMbayes2.

I grew up watching Looney Tunes animated cartoons. I suspect that's true for most of us, which explains why so many people were excited to learn that there’s a new

I’ve never been afraid of heights, but I still appreciated the vertigo-inducing thrills of the 2022 movie “Fall,” which told the story of two women who climb a rusty old

I've never been afraid of heights, but I still appreciated the vertigo-inducing thrills of the 2022 movie “Fall,” which told the story of two women

I love Ryan Reynolds’ snarky/sarcastic sense of humor, but I do understand there are some people who find the comedian to be a bit grating. For those people, may I

I love Ryan Reynolds' snarky/sarcastic sense of humor, but I do understand there are some people who find the comedian to be a bit grating.